aiqbench analysis
HERMES represents a significant advancement in end-to-end autonomous driving by integrating large vision-language models to explicitly handle long-tail safety scenarios and mixed-traffic interactions. The framework's ability to incorporate structured semantic knowledge into trajectory planning offers a robust solution for rare, hazard-centric events that traditional baselines often miss. This work bridges the gap between advanced multimodal understanding and reliable decision-making in complex real-world environments.
HERMES: A Holistic End-to-End Risk-Aware Multimodal Embodied System with Vision-Language Models for Long-Tail Autonomous Driving
arXiv:2602.00993v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models increasingly benefit from large vision-language models for semantic understanding, yet safe and reliable planning under long-tail conditions remains challenging, particularly in mixed-traffic environments involving heterogeneous road users and rare safety-critical interactions. This paper proposes HERMES, a holistic risk-aware end-to-end multimodal driving framework that explicitly incorporates long-tail semantic knowledge into trajectory planning. HERMES employs a foundation-model-assisted annotation pipeline to construct structured Long-Tail Scene Context and Long-Tail Planning Context, capturing hazard-centric scene information, maneuver intent, and risk-aware planning guidance. A Tri-Modal Driving Module then integrates multi-view visual observations, historical ego-motion, and long-tail semantic instructions through intent- and risk-aware conditioning for trajectory generation. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world long-tail driving benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements over representative recent baselines in overall planning performance and across diverse safety-critical scenarios. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and complementary roles of the major components within HERMES.
Abstract:End-to-end autonomous driving models increasingly benefit from large vision-language models for semantic understanding, yet safe and reliable planning under long-tail conditions remains challenging, particularly in mixed-traffic environments involving heterogeneous road users and rare safety-critical interactions. This paper proposes HERMES, a holistic risk-aware end-to-end multimodal driving framework that explicitly incorporates long-tail semantic knowledge into trajectory planning. HERMES employs a foundation-model-assisted annotation pipeline to construct structured Long-Tail Scene Context and Long-Tail Planning Context, capturing hazard-centric scene information, maneuver intent, and risk-aware planning guidance. A Tri-Modal Driving Module then integrates multi-view visual observations, historical ego-motion, and long-tail semantic instructions through intent- and risk-aware conditioning for trajectory generation. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world long-tail driving benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements over representative recent baselines in overall planning performance and across diverse safety-critical scenarios. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and complementary roles of the major components within HERMES.
Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2602.00993 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2602.00993v2 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.00993 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 238 words
Related coverage

[AINews] Reality Checks on AI News (Yegge shuts down Gas Town, Databricks’ +60% Astra cost)
Latent Space · Sep 17, 2026

Import AI 471: Why Hugging Face worries me; space mining; FIve Eyes on AI
Import AI · Aug 31, 2026

[AINews] OpenAI shuts off Cursor
Latent Space · Aug 29, 2026
Uncertainty-Aware Decision Making in Multimodal Large Language Models
arXiv · Aug 19, 2026